Familiarity : how does knowing a face affect processing?

Abstract

Given the importance of recognising faces, the focus of the present thesis is the examination of how perceiver knowledge, or expertise with faces, may influence the processes being used.  Specifically, this thesis addresses the issue of whether all faces are processed in the same way, or whether qualitative differences exist in the processing of familiar over unfamiliar faces.

An examination of the empirical findings in this area lead to the construction of three hypotheses, each of which was supported by previous research within the field.  The first hypothesis was based on the notion that processing of familiar faces is reliant on expert strategies such as configural processing, and that such strategies are disrupted by various stimulus manipulations (such as inversion).  Therefore, it was predicted that processing of familiar faces would be more disrupted than processing of unfamiliar faces by inversion (expertise hypothesis).  The second hypothesis sprang from evidence for the formation of robust representations in a highly familiar face, and predicted that processing of familiar faces would be less affected by stimulus manipulation than would the processing of unfamiliar faces.  Finally, the null hypothesis predicted no qualitative differences in the processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces.

Two sets of experiments were presented comprising face recognition tasks (studies 1, 2, 3 & 4) and face classification tasks (studies 5, 6 & 7).  Although the first experiment, a speeded familiarity task, produced findings consistent with the expertise hypothesis, the emergence of methodological problems established that the results should be treated with caution.  Experiments 2, 3 and 4 were old/new recognition tasks were stimulus inversion (studies 2 & 3 ) and negation (study 4) was used to examine the influence of familiarity.  The results were mixed, but in all three studies a familiarity advantage was found in terms of either response latencies or accuracy.  The face classification studies produced results wholly compatible with the robust representation hypothesis.

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